Joe Soucheray: So why don't the anti-smoking zealots care about marijuana?

St. Paul Pioneer Press ^ | 2/4/14 | Joe Soucheray

[rhema]

Because we don't have enough to worry about and the news is slow and it's February and, well, the whole country seems to be suffering from cabin fever, a new level of smoking has been defined just to shake us up. I suppose, whenever there is a lull in the national conversation, you can always count on a medical researcher to bring up smoking, just in case we forget it is a nasty habit.

There is, as we all know, firsthand smoke. Firsthand smoke is when you actually light a cigarette while you are standing outside in a frigid doorway and start puffing away. Firsthand smoke is dangerous. We have been told that for about 50 years now.

There is also secondhand smoke. People who have quit smoking but accidently walk past the guy standing in the frigid doorway and smell the smoke from the guy's cigarette are exposed to secondhand smoke. Secondhand smoke is apparently responsible for there being no firsthand smoking anymore inside restaurants and bars and theaters and the like. A few of us actually remember when you would go to see the Saints play the Millers at the St. Paul Auditorium and you could hardly see the skaters because of the haze in the building.

Now, researchers at the University of California-Riverside have come up with a new hand. They have come up with thirdhand smoke. Thirdhand smoke is the smoke left behind by secondhand smoke on drapes and furniture and table tops and whatnot. In other words, it is the faint odor of smoke you get in many hotel rooms that have seen better days. Why it isn't the smoke left behind by firsthanders doesn't seem to make sense, but it does give a new heft to the seriousness of secondhand smoke.

I guess the secondhand smoke clings to surfaces and builds up as a toxic coating. When mice were exposed to thirdhand smoke, they started acting goofy and got a little hyperactive.

Manuela Martins-Green, a professor of cell biology who led the study, said in a statement reported by CBS News: "We found significant damage occurs in the liver and lung. Wounds in these mice took longer to heal."

By the standard of there now being a thirdhand smoke, we can never be safe. For if there is thirdhand smoke, doesn't it stand to reason there has to be a fourth- and fifth- and maybe even a sixth-hand exposure? I mean, if you buy a coffee table at a garage sale that was exposed to cigarette smoke, you are at least at a level four contamination. There was the original owner of the table, a smoker, all the secondhand smoke the table was exposed to on Sunday nights watching Ed Sullivan, the thirdhand smoke that has resulted in the table being so cheap in the first place and now the fourth hand, bringing that piece of furniture with its thirdhand effects into your dwelling, where, if you have mice, they will start acting goofy.

You have to grudgingly admire the zealots. They just don't stop. If they feel that they have not frightened enough people, they just come up with another hand.

I keep looking, but have yet to discover where the anti-smoking zealots stand on the legalization of marijuana. It seems to me that marijuana is just as dangerous as cigarettes. The residues are just as oily and toxic, thus meeting the criteria for first-, second- and thirdhand exposures. Not to mention that marijuana has the additional fault of contributing to obesity because marijuana smokers often consume whole loaves of Wonder Bread at one sitting.

But I have yet to see or hear the zealots go after marijuana. I don't see any billboards. I don't see any warnings. I don't see any force of public shaming beginning to gain ground. I don't even see any high-powered law firms looking for somebody to sue. Man alive, imagine what some of those early settlements would have been if they had had a third hand to work with.

[RipSawyer]

Well, I certainly don’t recommend it but I don’t think that everyone who smokes it turns into a liberal either.

[ansel12]

Not literally everyone, but it is amazing how almost instantly the majority of people who take it up, seem to have been transformed into a “type”, we have all seen this happen over and over in high school, the pod people transformation is something we are all well familiar with and see writ large, in Cannabis based cultures.

[Wallace T.]

The laws against narcotics were piggybacked onto the prohibition era laws against alcohol. Until about the turn of the 20th Century, narcotics were legal. However, the Progressive movement of the early 20th Century saw government regulation and prohibition as the solution for the social problems caused by both alcohol and narcotics. In these matters, the Progressives were supported by conservative Protestants, especially the Baptists, Methodists, and Campbellites, who saw alcohol and drug use as moral issues on the same level as sexual sins. (Catholics and liturgical Protestant churches did not share this view.)

As you point out, narcotics were a relatively new issue in American society, whereas alcohol had been around for millennia. Cocaine, opium, and heroin are of tropical or Asian origin. Marijuana may be an exception, as hemp was extensively cultivated for fiber since colonial times and its recreational use was not unknown. One claim is that Shakespeare and Baudelaire made reference to marijuana use in their writings. In any case, other nations which did not have alcohol prohibition, such as Canada and Britain, made narcotics illegal at about the same time as the United States did.

[ansel12]

Actually the drug laws started when immigration started making them an issue in the 1800s.

[Wallace T.]

Are you referring to Asian, especially Chinese, immigration as the source of drug laws, as they came from societies with serious opium problems?

I don't believe drug use was an issue with any of the European immigrant groups. With regard to alcohol prohibition, some authors, such as Kevin MacDonald (in Occidental Review) on the right and Ken Burns (in America magazine) on the left have argued that Prohibition was targeted at European immigrants, specifically Catholics, where beer and wine were integrated into social and family life more than it was among British descended Protestants, especially in the South and Midwest. To these writers, both Prohibition and laws placing quotas on Southern and Eastern European immigration were nativist in origin.

[dsc]

”I can’t imagine a pot smoker getting elected to congress, or to the mayorship of a major city, or governor of a state, or the presidency.”

You can’t imagine Slick Willie Clintstone or Hussein O’Bamturd?

[Some Fat Guy in L.A.]

Because they’re too stoned to worry about much of anything except the potato chip inventory.